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Gail Godwin - 'Grief Cottage'

She's been a finalist three times for the National Book Award, and has been one of the South's leading authors of realistic fiction for decades. We welcome back Gail Godwin on Thursday, June 8, at 6 pm (note the earlier start time). Her latest novel isGrief Cottage, set on a South Carolina island. As a young boy and his aunt deal with the traumatic events of their lives, they are both drawn to a supposedly haunted cottage. But is it ghosts or memories that haunt them? Discover the latest from the author ofFlora and Evensong.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three, Helen lost her mother, and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died.

Publishing is a personal story of a writer's hunger to be published, the pursuit of that goal, and then the long haul--for Gail Godwin, forty-five years of being a published writer and all that goes with it. A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1958, Godwin met with Knopf scouts who came to campus every spring in search of new talent.